Procurement Skills - A Simple Way to Write a Senior Management Proposal
March 9th, 2010
It can be tempting when writing a proposal for senior management to try and show them how clever you are. Your proposal then becomes bogged down with impenetrable prose that means little or nothing to them with the inevitable result that management miss the essential point of what you are trying to say and so give your proposal insufficient attention. You need to keep it simple to be effective. Here’s how.
1.No jargon. Over time people in your profession have come up with short hand ways to describe terms that are familiar to everyone in that profession. They are a good way of speeding up communication between peers but do little to convince others. If they don’t understand you they are likely to miss your crucial message and so dismiss your proposal without due consideration. The burden is on you to make your prose understandable to everyone so inspect your proposal closely for terms or acronyms that are not used in everyday life.
2.Appeal to emotions. Our brains operate with two independent systems. One handles the rational side of what we do and think. It is the one responsible for analysing data and looking into the future. The other system looks after our emotional side; it is instinctive and works at the level of pleasure and pain. Often it is the emotional system that makes decisions even when we are convinced we have used logic and analysis. So use this and make sure your proposal appeals to emotions. Paint a picture with words that describes how your proposal will impact the things that are important to them - things such as how to make money, how to save money or how to reduce risk.
3.Get to the core. This isn’t the same as making it simple. The core is the essence of your proposal - what is left once you have stripped away everything that is not relevant to your core idea. Usually you can describe the core of your i Read the rest of this entry »
